WhatsApp Beta brings granular Storage Usage management to Android

WhatsApp Beta brings granular Storage Usage management to Android

For a long time now, WhatsApp has offered granular storage control over its chats on iOS, but the feature was nowhere to be found on Android. You could either manually delete an entire conversation and its corresponding media or select multiple messages to delete them and their media, but that was it until WhatsApp beta finally added proper storage management a couple of days ago.

Head over to Settings -> Data and storage usage -> Storage usage (new menu) and wait a few seconds for all of your conversations to populate and their data to be tallied. Once done, you'll see a list of your chats sorted by how much space they take on your device (largest to smallest).

Tap any chat and you'll see a detailed tally (number and storage taken) of every message type that's been sent or received: text messages, shared contact cards, locations, images, GIFs, videos, audio messages, and documents. Below that is a Manage messages option to select and delete any or all message types.

That should come in handy for clearing those large groups where most of what's shared are photos and videos and funny audio clips, but without getting rid of the important texts and documents, for example.

We're pretty sure this feature only showed up a few days ago, so you should have it if you're running the latest v2.17.340 beta. If you don't have that yet, you can join the official beta on the Play Store